“1000 Dreams” is a project of stories and photographs of refugees produced by refugees who currently reside in Europe, which allows us to learn about their strengths, their challenges, and their dreams.
Our understanding of the refugee experience most often comes through stories told by others, creating biased perceptions and stereotypes. Those stereotypes have a negative impact on public narratives, but also on policies. For the narratives to change, refugee voices must be heard. “1000 Dreams” allows us to know the stories of people on the move and to learn about their strengths, their challenges, and their dreams. “1000 Dreams” is a project created and run by the non-profit organization Witness Change. The interviews and photographs that make up “1000 Dreams” have been produced by refugees who currently reside in Europe. It’s a project about refugees, by refugees. Every refugee storyteller went through a workshop and mentorship programme with Witness Change, teaching them photography and interviewing skills.
As Heinrich Böll Foundation Thessaloniki one of our goals is to indeed change the narrative around migration and to amplify the stories of refugees and migrants and support them being heard, seen and understood. For EU-migration policies to become better, policy-makers but also the broad public need to understand the realities of people on the move in Europe.
Therefore, we were glad to be able to support a photography and storytelling workshop, which took place in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in June 2020. In the framework of this workshop 8 participants with a refugee experience from various backgrounds were trained and equipped with the tools needed to collect stories of other refugees. Despite the difficult transitory context in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the group was amazingly dedicated and indeed succeeded in collecting some very powerful stories during and after successful graduation from the workshop.
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Already during the workshop we thought of possible ways to display the photographs and stories our participants were about to collect and create. As much as the workshop in itself was valuable for the trained storytellers, we were seeking an opportunity for a broad audience to be able to see the “1000 Dreams” portraits and stories. Thereby we aimed at offering viewers a direct, non-mediated sense of the individual story behind so called “refugee”. We thought of a public exhibition to provide this very human perspective to an otherwise mostly mis- and underrepresented group. Ideally, we were thinking of exhibiting in a political context, to have a direct impact on decision-makers. When discussing with the workshop participants potential ideas the European Parliament came up. All the participants in the room were aware of or had even experienced consequences of EU migration and asylum policies. The idea of targeting this particular audience resonate strongly with everyone in the room.
Thanks to Greens/EFA in the European Parliament and upon kind invitation of Erik Marquardt, MEP, this dream became true! We were indeed offered the opportunity to exhibit a selection of the impressive “1000 Dreams” photos and stories in the EP in Strasbourg on 10-13 July 2023.
We were also able to invite three refugee photographers/storytellers to come to Strasbourg in order to present their work and speak of their experience. This was a truly great chance to directly approach parliamentarians and staffers. While the exhibition speaks for itself, an opening reception on 10 July 2023, which we co-organised with the Greens/EFA and Erik Marquardt allowed for our partner Witness Change and the story-tellers Zahra Mojahed, Elsayd Elsehamy Abdelhamid and Mirza Durakovic, from Afghanistan, Egypt and Bosnia and Herzegovina, to take the floor and to introduce “1000 Dreams” and the idea behind it, but also to speak of their personal journey becoming storytellers and collecting stories of fellow refugees.
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In addition, the mayor of the city of Strasbourg, Jeanne Barseghian, kindly supported an exhibition of “1000 Dreams” to be installed in front of the Strasbourg city hall for 4 weeks (July-August 2023) for the public to see and read about the refugee experience. Thereby we managed to have both, a targeted audience of policy-makers in the EP, who came and met our storytellers and learned about the project, but also a broad public in the city. Thankfully, we were given the opportunity to exhibit “1000 Dreams” in such a central open air spot of the city for thousands to see. The exhibition furthermore was launched and acknowledged by Madame Mayor Barseghian herself during a reception celebrating the 70th anniversary of the European Parliament of Strasbourg.
As Heinrich Böll Stiftung we are extremely greatful to everybody who contributed to this, of course starting with our workshop participants and then storytellers/photographers, Witness Change, Erik Marquardt and his team and the Greens/EFA group of the European Parliament, but also MEPs like Tineke Strik and Dietmar Köster and of course Strasbourg’s Mayor Jeanne Barseghian.
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